photo credit: malweth We all need somewhere to live, a place of privacy and rest. For the last sixty years, it made economic sense to buy and own a home – generally, prices went only one way, UP! Australia now has a fully inflated housing bubble awaiting a pinprick. When it happens (soon, soon), the [...]
Causes Behind the Global Financial Crisis and 70′s Stagflation Presenter: Steven Spadijer (ANU) 119th Annual Henry George Commemorative Dinner Thursday Sept 2nd, 6pm onwards RSVP by Friday 27th August. Steven Spadijer is an honours student in Arts/Law at the Australian National University, where he is currently completing a series of papers on business cycles the [...]
photo credit: jirotrom We honor Liberty in name and in form. We set up her statues and sound her praises. But we have not fully trusted her. And with our growth so grow her demands. She will have no half service! Liberty! It is a word to conjure with, not to vex the ear in [...]
photo credit: A Hermida Dear Reader, I have been issuing stern warnings about how Australia’s house prices are too high and must correct soon. I cannot say when the market will turn, but rabbit on that IT MUST! IT MUST! I try your patience. Other Cassandras have come to the same over-priced conclusion. Last week, [...]
photo credit: ob1left Australia’s tax system protects foreign producers against their Australian competitors, writes Gavin R. Putland in this LVRG article. The Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) was sunk by the advertising firepower of the big miners, ostensibly because it would make Australian mineral deposits less competitive with foreign alternatives. The complex, bureaucratic, maximally-interventionist Carbon [...]
photo credit: Dru! A survey of property investors in The Age today by Colemar Brunton shows sentiment delicately poised between those who see the market flat or falling and those anticipating further rises. This is not the bursting of The Great Australian Property Bubble that Prosper and many other commentators like Jeremy Grantham and [...]
photo credit: Trois Têtes (TT) In at least 18 major US cities, the trend to suburban living to escape the crowded squalor of inner areas is reversing. Older buildings are being remade as homes for the affluent after generations as slums. The collapse in US property prices is accelerating the trend. Bright young things [...]
Watch this masterful animation to an excellent speech by social theorist David Harvey: Continue on by reading two pieces in the world leading Financial Times newspaper. One by Michael Hudson on Latvia’s Third Option: As Europe’s banking crisis deepens, Greece’s and Spain’s fiscal crisis spreads throughout Europe and the US economy stalls, most discussions of [...]
photo credit: Grégory Tonon This week’s backdown by the federal labor government on the Mineral Resource Rent Tax will cost Australian taxpayers $35 billion over the next ten years. The shortfall in government revenues will be made up from taxes on work and taxes on business. That means it is coming out of your [...]
photo credit: Urban~Spaceman Miners finally agree to tax reform. What are the changes? The attempt to harness economic rents for the public good has been renamed from the Resource Super Profits tax to the Mineral Resource Rent Tax. The MRRT kicks in at the corporate bond rate plus 7%. That is 12%, rather than the [...]